Ask most tradespeople what their marketing costs and they can tell you to the pound. Ask what a job costs to win and the answer is usually a shrug. That gap is where money disappears.
The fix is not complicated. It is a handful of tools, wired together once, so that every enquiry can be traced back to where it came from and whether it turned into work. Once that is in place you stop arguing with your gut about whether the ads are working, and start moving budget to whatever is bringing in jobs.
Here is the setup we build for local service businesses, in the order we build it.
Decide what counts as a lead
Before tracking anything, write down what a lead is. For most trades it is one of four things: a phone call that lasts long enough to be a real enquiry, a completed quote form, a WhatsApp message, or a live chat conversation. Wrong numbers, sales calls from suppliers and people asking if you sell parts are not leads.
This matters because if you count everything, your cost per lead looks great and means nothing. If you count only real enquiries, the number is honest and you can act on it.
We usually set a minimum call duration of around 30 to 45 seconds. Below that it is almost never a genuine customer.
Track calls by source with dynamic numbers
Call tracking works by showing a different phone number to visitors depending on where they came from. Someone who clicked a Google ad sees one number. Someone who found you in the map pack sees another. Someone who typed your website address directly sees a third. Your real number is never lost, every tracked number forwards to it.
The tool swaps the number on your website automatically, records which source each call came from, and logs the duration. Most also record the call, which is useful for training and for checking whether enquiries are being handled well.
One rule: keep your main number consistent on Google Business Profile, directories and your van. Use dynamic numbers on the website only. Inconsistent numbers across the web hurt local rankings.
Track forms and messages the same way
Every quote form should fire a conversion event when it is submitted, not when the page loads. That sounds obvious but a large share of the accounts we audit are counting page views as leads.
WhatsApp click-to-chat buttons and live chat widgets should fire events too. If you use a chat tool, most of them can pass the lead into Google Analytics and Google Ads with a small piece of configuration.
All of these end up in the same place: GA4 as the record, and Google Ads or your other platforms as the thing that optimises towards them.
Close the loop with won jobs
Cost per lead is useful. Cost per won job is what pays the mortgage. The difference is closing the loop: recording which leads turned into booked, completed work.
At the simplest level this is a spreadsheet with the lead source, the date, whether it became a job and what it was worth. If you use a job management or CRM tool, the lead source can be captured on the record and exported later.
Once you have a few months of this you can see things like: ads bring in more leads but the map pack brings in bigger jobs, or Sunday evening enquiries rarely convert. That is the information that changes decisions.
What good looks like
A trades business with this in place can answer four questions every month:
- How many real enquiries did we get, by source?
- What did each source cost per enquiry?
- What proportion became jobs, and what were they worth?
- Where should next month's budget go?
The setup takes about a week the first time. After that it runs itself and needs a monthly check. Compared with guessing, it is the cheapest marketing improvement most local businesses will ever make.
Have questions about this topic? Get in touch—we're happy to discuss your specific situation.